Reprinted from RAW
January 24th - February 6th, 1990
An interview with Alvin Lee, with recollections
of Woodstock and of jamming with Jimi Hendriz
| Some years after TEN YEARS AFTER called it a day, they're back, and perhaps surprisingly, being greeted with positive applause for their recent album "About Time". Veteran guitar slinger ALVIN LEE looks back, forward and sideways, SYLVIE SIMMONS catches his Bluesy drift. |
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| IT'S THREE in the morning, an ice-cold
New York night, the bars are closed,
the
bottle's getting low, and there's a
witch
sitting on the hotel bed. Long black
hair,
wigged-out eyes and a nice line in
cosmic
witchie patter. We'd just been out
on the
street talking to Ten Years After in
their
tour bus, Carole the publicist, Paul
the
Rock writer and I, after their piledriver perform
ance at The Ritz club. And the witch, figur
ing we knew the band, followed us upstairs
and hid in the toilet. When she emerged,
she made a speech: she was not only a witch but
Ten Years After's biggest fan! She was bap
tised in the sweat flying from Alvin Lee's
snake-fingered solos! Her boyfriend, who
re
fused to come, actually is Alvin Lee, though
temporarily living in a different,
dark-haired
American body so as not to confuse
anybody.
Ten Years After, she declared, had
"changed
her life". Well it was a hell of a show, raw as a chill-blain in stilettos, equal parts virtuoso experience and unbridled energy .Funny business, all these ancient bands reforming at the end of the last decade, and such a large proportion of them playing worthy, seminal music. Ten Years After's' About Time', their first album since 1974's 'Positive Vibrations', is their best album since '69's 'Shhh'. Produced by Terry Manning of ZZ Top fame, RAW's Malcolm Dome reckoned it was the album the Top should have made after 'Eliminator', and I can't disagree. 15 years ago, after leading the British Blues Rock boom, after an amazing 28 tours of the States, Ten Years After dissolved. "We just stopped touring," explains Alvin Lee. "We never hated each other. Ever! When we packed it in we'd been eight years on the road and we just got disenchanted. In fact we started getting disenchanted after the 'Wood stock' movie came out in '70. A lot of people said that made Ten Years After, but in fact we were doing real good before then, playing 3-5,000 five thousand seaters. When the movie came out, it was like the megadome arenas and ice-hockey stadiums. We did that for a few years, but we weren't enjoying it. We were originally an underground band, we started playing clubs like The Marquee, real good gigs. Those stadiums are totally wrong for music. You can't see the audience, you don't get the feel. The sound just echoes around those places, and we kind of lost heart. I don't even know who brought it up first, but someone said, I'm getting fed up with this' and everyone went, 'Yeah, so am I'. So the honest thing to do was call it a day ." ALVIN EMBARKED on a patchy solo career, the others gravitated towards more behind-the-scenes roles in the music industry; producing, publishing. They kept in touch -saw each other four or five times a year for a drink -and when someone sug gested they give it another go after eight years, just for The Marquee's 25th anniversary celebrations, they said, 'Okay'. Weren't they worried that after eight years one of them might have completely lost it, that the band wouldn't work? "In retrospect," says Alvin, "maybe I should have thought that. But for some reason I thought it was going to be easy. We had two days rehearsal. We got together for five minutes, chatted a bit to feel things out, but when we actually started playing, the amazing thing was it sounded exactly like Ten Years After! By rights it should have sounded a bit different, but it was unmistake ably TYA." So why didn't they stick around and make an album back in 1983? "1 thought somebody might pick up on us, but it was definitely the young boys' time then. It was all haircuts and baggy trousers, and we had long hair and tight trousers still! I don't know. No-one seemed to want us." But when, in '88, it appeared that someone did, they jumped at the chance to reform, becoming one of the many veteran acts treading the boards again. "1 think part of that is the Stock, Aitken & Waterman formula-singles thing. It's getting so boring now. There's not the kind of music you can actually go and get excited about in a live situation. Some of the bands don't even play live, they use tapes on stage. That's dreadful. And other bands, the better bands, are just performing their albums on stage. "The thing, I think, with older bands is there's more jamming, more interplay. Ten Years After, Rolling Stones, you can see the concerts and hear the same numbers but they never sound quite the same, they're always changing, and it doesn't get boring. "We've always tried to make our albums sound like live gigs, whereas a lot of bands try to make their gigs sound like the albums. " Also, I think some of the younger kids today look back to that kind of '60s together ness thing, the peace movement, the anti- establishment thing, and they're saying, 'I wish we could have something like that'.Something to pull them together." Something, I suppose, like Woodstock, the festival that made TY A US superstars. "Woodstock was an accident," says Alvin. "It was disorganised and that's what was 'great about it. It was never meant to be that big of a deal. It was declared a National Disaster Area wasn't it?" he laughs. "To me the star of Woodstock was the audience. "I've got a jumble of memories. The most vivid is the journey in, because we could only get within about ten miles of the site and no nearer, the roads were all jammed. So we bundled into an army helicopter with an open side and I had a safety harness on. I was dangling out of the helicopter over half-a-million people. "Backstage, there was a lot of politics and bartering over who was going on before who. I didn't get involved in it. I went for a walk around the lake and joined in with the audience and saw it from the other side of the stage. It was great. No-one knew who I was, but people were offering me food and drink being really friendly. There wasn't so much camaraderie backstage. There's been a "Maybe it was the age we all were, but there seemed a lot more ego problems in the '60s" lot more of that kind of thing between different bands since Live Aid. Like the 'Guitar Speak' thing that I did" -the Night Of The Guitars tour, 1988, starring Lee, Leslie West, Steve Howe et al -"that was a load of fun. ..And, guitarists are renowned for not getting along! "There were ten lead guitarists there and it was great. Maybe it was the age we all were, but there seemed a lot more ego problems in the '60s." So, what were the egos like when Alvin jammed on stage with Jimi Hendrix one legendary night in New York?! "He was so far out that I never even tried to compete with him! He was too far out for me to even comprehend. Like he was on his own channel and everyone else was on theirs. And he was a larger-than-life guy as well with that kind of aura about him. I think he once said he was from Mars," he laughs, "and I thought maybe he was. "He's left-handed so he couldn't play my guitar, so he took Leo's bass and played it upside-down. But he wasn't playing bass. He started playing lead bass and taking over. It was so incredible, we actually just stopped and let him carry on, and he kind of went off into outerspace. He took a guitar and went 20 steps further than I've ever heard it go." And, so to the new album. Were you worried about the original TYA feel living on after so long? "No. But, there was a danger sticking with the roots that it would sound old-fashioned. I think Terry Manning helped a lot. He encouraged us to keep it simple. And, as for the ZZ Top comparisons: " A compliment indeed! I thought 'Eliminator' was a great album. In fact when I first heard 'Gimme All Your Lovin" I was upset, because I thought, 'Why didn't I write that?' There's one track on our album called 'Judgement Day' and the intro sounds just like ZZ, that Billy Gibbons guitar sound and the way he played it. I got to the end of the song and said to Terry , 'That sounded like ZZ Top did it? You're going to get the blame for this as the producer!'." Yeah. But, what the hell. .. |